


When Two Suns Are Shining

by lonewytch



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), No Fandom
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Eleventh Doctor Era, F/M, Love, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-13
Updated: 2011-10-13
Packaged: 2017-10-26 09:53:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/281649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonewytch/pseuds/lonewytch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Snippets of River's life with and without the Doctor after being sent to Stormcage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When Two Suns Are Shining

_They run. Hard. Low hanging leaves slap at them as they move through the ancient forest. The light is eerie, the canopy low, the trees feel sentient, sending a shiver over her as she passes each one.  Her breath burns through her; she has become an animal now – sleek, fast, attuned to danger, quicker than anything else in the woods. She takes it all in and stores it away inside her, safe, for the future. A fruit, like a child’s red balloon tangled high above, bright orange eyes watching covertly from the dark of low lying bushes as they rush by, and once, the quick glare of a river to her right._  
 _Ahead of her, he trips, flails, long arms windmilling frantically. She hasn’t the breath to speak, so she catches his arm as she rushes by, pulls him in her wake._  
   
***  
Out in space, day and night don’t exist. When River has him to herself for what the clock on the console tells her is more than 24 hours, she follows the cues of her body. She sleeps when she needs to, eats when she needs to and forgets to count. In-between food and dreaming there is a limitless expanse of their skin, whispers as they drowse in the golden light of the bedroom, murmured words that stretch them out into the space surrounding them. On the rare occasions that he sleeps, she slips away from him, barefoot. The Tardis floor is warm underfoot and as she walks she trails her hands along the corridor walls. She often feels the Tardis more strongly when she does that, bright inside her mind. Like the first time in Berlin, a conflagration inside which felt like it would scorch her, but instead became a slow and steady pulse of love, and sudden understanding _._    
When he sleeps she walks the corridors into the amber glow of the console room. She circles around then presses her hands against the console for a moment, then moves to the doors and flings them wide. She imagines how her breath should rush away from her into nothingness and how she should spiral out into the frozen sky , but for the protective shell of the Tardis which cocoons her. She sees many things, those nights by herself on the cusp of the universe. She sees two galaxies in the process of colliding; a solar system in a gradual slide into a black hole; pulsars that almost blind her as they flash, despite the protective shell of the Tardis. Once she looks out and sees nothing but a void, a blackness so deep she wants to reach out and bury her fingers deep into it to see if it rips. This frightens her in a way that is so rare for her that afterwards she runs back to the bed, back to blood and to life and to the world of his warmth and scent.  
   
 ***  
  _She whips her head around to check on him. He runs like a giant insect, all arms, legs and elbows, catching on bushes and bark. He meets her eye for a moment and grins fiercely, one small slice in the whole of time when he will do just that right here and right now. She can’t help but smile herself. He runs surprisingly fast and she’s gained only a few feet on him since he stumbled. She hears his breath behind her, coming in hot rushes, broken by the pounding of his feet. The forest thins a little and the light begins to stab through the canopy. Now they run from light, to dark, to light to dark again. She can sense her pupils contracting and dilating, and almost feels disorientated for a moment. She ups her pace and the light quickens to a flickering which she lets lift her, push her along._  
   
***  
Time in the Stormcage seems to pass slowly at first between his visits.  
The rain is always hurling itself at the windows, the half-night outside is perpetual. Huge drops shatter against enforced plastic that can withstand even the dense hail that comes with the very worst storms. She schools herself in patience and learns to forget about the ebb and flow of time passing. She tucks her feet under herself and writes in her diary, she reads books he has given her, she needles the guards at any opportunity. The rain and the wind become her companions, she can hear in its cadences when a storm is on its way. When there are storms – and it’s often – many times in the first months she picks the lock of her cell, and follows the curve of the corridor quickly and silently to the large metal door which leads to the guard platform encircling her level of the Stormcage. None of them patrol during the storms, though they are supposed to, it’s too bleak and elemental out there. Privately she believes that the thunderclaps scare them. She has no concern about fear though, and so she picks the lock to the outside on those nights and then steps out onto the walkway. She pushes herself close against the railing, she stretches her arms out and she opens her mouth to the rain. She laughs at the flare of the lightening slicing away at the cliffs, she screams into the thunder. She watches the rain plummet thousands of feet, and she yearns to jump – not to die – just to freefall, suspended in nothingness yet carried by air and water downwards. As she returns to her cell the water is a second skin which sloughs off her. She ignores the trail she leaves along the grey floor, breadcrumbs leading the next guard on patrol to her cell door. They are beginning to learn now that she leaves her cell when she will and that there is little point in berating her. She will always come back, even though they don’t know that. There is a good reason why she chooses to stay here.  
   
***  
 Far away, a man in a blue box is skirting the corner of a bright nebula, pressing at buttons and flinging levers in a mad journey across the sky. Time streams through his head, backwards and forwards, it spirals and curls like brittle leaves, only gold, and hotter than the biggest suns. Sparks fly from hanging wires as he pushes buttons. He pays it no mind, he has things to do, places to be, converging streams of time to attend to. The glow of the walls inside his box wraps him as he careens around its centre.  
   
***  
  _A gun bounces at her hip as she runs. A key is gripped tightly in her palm. Later he will see the shape of it imprinted on her palm. Then he will trace the dark pink well of skin with his forefinger, he will tip her chin so that she looks up at him, and the look in his eyes will make something move in her chest as if she’s been running again, she will find herself breathless and almost unable to think._  
 _But for now, they run. She can hear his gasps behind her, but she doesn’t turn this time. The forest boundary is ahead of them, a streak of light split many times by the trunks of trees. Beyond those furthest pioneer trees that have encroached onto the meadowlands of this planet, she glimpses a splash of blue, moving behind one trunk and then another, dancing as her body rises and falls to the rhythm of her legs. Even without seeing her, she can sense that they are close. It’s not words trailing across her mind, or a picture,  it’s something deep inside her that makes up all the matter of who she is, and as such it’s not only in one place within her. More, it’s something that tracks along the threads of her nervous system, thrilling her as they get closer. “Home” she gasps involuntarily through gritted teeth._  
   
***  
   
He is no longer shy and awkward with their lovemaking. Where once he was a frightened bird in her hands, all mumbling and blushes, now he rises to her like a wave and touches her freely and constantly when they are alone. His fingers are always trailing her arm, just so, his hand on the small of her back, against her hair. River, so often barefoot in the Tardis can feel through her feet a thrum of contentment.  
He tells her about Idris, about how the Tardis spoke to him once in words in a scrapyard outside the universe. How she was captured for a brief span of time in flesh and blood, and that she called him her thief. There’s sadness in him when he speaks of it and so she takes his hands, places his fingers against her temples and tells him to listen for the Tardis inside her. She feels him inside her mind first then feels the light of the Tardis in her brighten in recognition. He holds her fiercely after that, kissing her head over and over.  
Once, he tells her stories about Gallifrey. She closes her eyes and lies back and lets the words carry her. His voice becomes impassioned and he paints it with his words so glorious that the pictures in her head dazzle her, and when his voice begins to crack she pulls him down onto the bed with her and kisses him.  
   
***  
   
 She comes and goes from the facility as she pleases now, though makes sure that most of her time is spent at Stormcage, returning like needle to a compass to her cell. She travels as she can, using what she comes by. She drinks shots that taste of blueberries and sunshine and that freeze her throat as they slide down, but burn inside her stomach. She visits her parents and laughs as they drink wine together under the stars, and toast the Doctor. She visits a very small minor planet of artisans where a miniature  ice age has encrusted every building in the cities there, where the people have tunnelled through the thick ice to their dwellings and businesses, carving magnificent and outlandish artworks of exquisite beauty into the ice. She stops at a market on a planet in the burning heat of a binary system, and against her better judgement she buys him a new bowtie that is deep ocean blue and ripples with actual moving streamers of subtle green light, because she knows he will love it.  
   
 ***  
Once she doesn’t see him for months and months. She’s unconcerned, though she misses him. She would know if he had gone, or so she tells herself. She needles the guards more than usual and slips from the cage several times to roam the skies trying to ease her restless feet, and to visit her mother who knows only too well what it is to wait,. She visits a bar on Hypoglaxerion, gets outrageously drunk, and then lies and cheats her way through a game of high stakes poker, before getting caught and having to make a run for it. When at last, one night, the papers she is working on begin to lift at the edges, and then to flutter to the floor and the rush and noise of the Tardis materialising outside her cell comes, she jumps from her bed and deftly picks the lock. Warmth suffuses her body as she waits, she thinks of his hands, of his skin, of good red wine and of whispering with him for hours while they spiral through space. It has been too long for her since she had him close. When the doors open and the golden glow falls across her face, she rushes across the threshold into the warmth and sees that he is broken. He sits, slumped forwards on the steps, his hair conceals his face but anguish emanates from him. Her heart drops hundreds of flights in a split second and she rushes forwards, but he looks up at her and says  
“Amy and Rory are fine. It’s not them. It’s not them. I couldn’t do anything…”  
and then he can’t speak any more, and she is with him, her hands on his face and in his hair, holding him tight. They sit just so, like that for what must be a long time. She remembers Berlin, when he lay broken and dying and she put her hands on his face and then kissed him and brought him life. She tries to remember what her hands felt like as the light poured from them, and she feels the Tardis inside her anxious, questing. She holds the connection and presses her hands against him, willing love and healing into him. Eventually he stirs and then pulls away, untangling himself out of her hands and arms holding her by the shoulders and pushing her back at arms length to study her face. His eyes are dry, he is beyond crying, instead she can see where despair has tugged at his brow and at the corners of his eyes. She will not ask him, just as she never does when he arrives carrying the weight of too much time lived upon him. When she sees a future him at some point in the days and months ahead, when time and distance have separated him from whatever sears at him, then he will tell her. For now, he just says  
“River, I’m sorry it’s been so long…I”  
“Hush, love” she tells him then. And she takes his hand and leads him up the stairs, down one of the corridors and into the bedroom, and heals him the best way she can and in the way he most needs right then.  
   
***  
 _He is still behind her but not by much as she breaches the edge of the forest. One second she is running in a strange flashing twilight, the next she is out into full sun, from coolness to heat, and momentarily she is blinded. The long grass slows legs her like water would, it ripples in the wind that she casts as she cuts through the air. The key almost slips in her palm, gripped too tight by her fingers and sliding in her sweat. It feels like there is no more oxygen in the air, as she slams into the Tardis doors and she is unusually uncoordinated as she scrabbles for the lock, in her haste. His feet behind her are a promise of arrival. The key slides home and she turns it and flings the door wide, spinning instantly to meet him. He makes the last few steps, his hair flapping ridiculously, his face pink and his arms pinwheeling in an attempt to stop himself crashing into her. She catches a split second glimpse of a figure pelting from the forest in pursuit before he slams the door, and they both frantically leap up the steps. Around the console they circle then, like a binary system, perfectly balanced, perfectly weighted._  
   
 ***  
 They have never exchanged rings, as is the custom of her people.  
 Instead, when they meet she touches his dark blue bowtie fondly if he is wearing it, and then she puts her head to his chest to listen to his twin hearts. She breathes him and he smells of the sweetness that is the Tardis -  slight smokiness and electricity like when it storms on a sunny day, and of his skin which always smells as if it has had the hot sun on it.  
 Instead, he puts his fingers into her hair, and his cheek close to hers to whisper to her, and they tumble through the Tardis doors, the air humming around them. They blaze in these moments, she thinks, they blaze so that surely everyone can see them across all of space and across all of time. So many small shining moments all gathered up and written into the small blue book she keeps hidden under her cell mattress. He looks at her and calls her _amazing_ and she never dreamed she could be so bright, so perfect.

  



End file.
